Supervisors Back Offshore Oil-Drilling Moratorium

In a vote marked by sniping between two of its members, the Orange County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted to support a moratorium on offshore oil drilling for one more year but refused to take a tougher stance on the issue.

The supervisors voted 3 to 2 to back Supervisor Harriett Wieder’s resolution for the one-year moratorium to let two federal departments “determine the extent and impact that offshore drilling would have on Orange County communities” and other California coastal areas.

The board refused to support Supervisor Bruce Nestande’s proposal that it flatly oppose all offshore oil drilling anywhere in California.

Nestande said that the board was “parochial” to oppose drilling in the waters off the county but accept it elsewhere in the state. Wieder retorted that she was indeed “a little more parochial” and “at this point, I’m not concerned about the whole state.”

‘We Are Far Apart’

Wieder’s comment was a gibe at Nestande’s candidacy for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor as well as his position on the oil-drilling issue.

At one point, Wieder contended that “we’re not far apart, Bruce.” Nestande disagreed, saying: “I think we are far apart.”

At another point, Wieder handed Nestande copies of a letter she had written to be passed to the other three supervisors. Nestande disdainfully tossed the copies toward his colleagues without bothering to read the letter himself.

The quarreling was a replay of last week’s verbal sparring when Nestande made Wieder agree not to identify herself as a representative of Orange County in her testimony before a House subcom mittee considering offshore oil drilling.

Two months ago, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel announced a compromise agreement with a group of California congressmen, most of them Democrats, to allow drilling in 150 nine-square-mile tracts of ocean floor off the state, while keeping 6,310 additional tracts closed for the next 15 years.

------------------------------------------------------------------Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel says he doesn’t expect immediate results with a new committee on offshore drilling. See story, Part I, Page 3.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Most of the tracts targeted for drilling were off the Northern California coast, but six were off the coast of Orange County.

The compromise proved highly unpopular with the oil industry and environmentalists, and Hodel scrapped it last week. Oil companies said the tracts that were opened up were of poor quality, and environmentalists and residents of coastal communities charged that drilling would hurt tourism and possibly increase pollution.

The federal government, which had imposed a moratorium on new offshore drilling for four years, is now trying to determine its action when that moratorium ends Oct. 15.

Wieder has written to Hodel and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Thomas, asking them to arrange a meeting in Orange County to discuss Interior’s demand for offshore drilling and EPA’s insistence that the county improve air quality. Wieder said that the two demands are contradictory because offshore oil drilling will increase air pollution.

Drilling Provides Jobs

Wieder argued that drilling off the California coast may be needed to reduce the U.S. dependency on imported oil and that some northern counties want the drilling to provide jobs.

Nestande contended that there should be a federal commitment to developing alternative energy sources and that the coastline and ocean “deserve a higher priority than any oil resources beneath them.”

The only vote Nestande garnered beside his own was that of Supervisor Ralph Clark, a former gas station owner who said that there are “reams of evidence” that past oil shortages “were contrived by the oil companies anyhow.”

Nestande said he was upset that “three members didn’t have the courage to vote” on his resolution and instead decided to “chicken out” and choose Wieder’s proposal. Wieder said that she thought “name-calling and nit-picking” were inappropriate.